Perhaps it could be like copyrights and patents? If you don’t defend them, you lose them, and in some cases they expire after a set amount of time and then they can be used by others
Stromer claimed that the specimen was from the early Cenomanian, about 97 million years ago.[8][6]
It was destroyed in World War II, specifically “during the night of 24/25 April 1944 in a British bombing raid of Munich” that severely damaged the building housing the Paläontologisches Museum München (Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology). However, detailed drawings and descriptions of the specimen remain. Stromer’s son donated Stromer’s archives to the Paläontologische Staatssammlung München in 1995, and Smith and colleagues analysed two photographs of the Spinosaurus holotype specimen BSP 1912 VIII 19 discovered in the archives in 2000.
Sporopollenin, recognized as one of the most chemically resilient biological polymers, forms a crucial component of the robust outer (exine) walls of spores and pollen grains in plants. It’s been found in rock up to 500,000 years old iirc.
Try doing that in Iceland. They’re both very aware and conflicted about invasive species up there. Lupin is invasive and covering the country and also building soil from nothing, Pine trees are invasive and the quickest way to get treecover that is desperately needed.
Makes for weird discussions, I guess Iceland is such and extreme case that nobody really knows if they should be saving the ecosystem it had managed to scratch together before we turned up or if they should be trying to rush a healthier ecosystem with imports (Iceland was pretty thin and fragile even before humans and we wrecked what little there was)
In California, we have Tumbleweed, and it’s actually really useful for stabilizing/fertilizing loose, disturbed soils and making shelter for native grasses and plants to start growing near. They also love to fuck with cars by jumping out in front of them at every opportunity.
While waving a flaming Deku stick around probably isn’t safe I don’t think you can blame California’s wildfires on a pointy-eared kid with a floppy hat.
Plants may add oxalate leachate to soil, making phosphorous more available and facilitating colonization. Can increase fire hazard, especially along tree rows and fences when dead plants build up.
Increases fire hazard (though may be a hazard primarily to human landscapes).
In other words, it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the overall ecological fire hazard, you’re mostly talking highway veg fires and stuff, which happen with or without tumbleweeds.
Are there many species there that are specific to Iceland which would be harmed by lupines and pines taking over?
If it’s most an amalgamation of stuff that commonly found elsewhere I think it would be fine.
If pine seeds came to Iceland on the wind 100 years before humans got there it would have been considered native. Most the seeds of all the other stuff got there the same way I imagine, unless they’ve been isolated since the island split from a continent somewhere.
Well there’s the native birch forests, which get outcompeted. But given the vikings killed them off it’s mostly just the opportunity cost of planting pine over birch. There was a bit of both, so it’s not all or nothing of course
There are roughly 2,200,000 known animal species, and 400,000 of those are just beetles. Entomologists estimate there are 10 quintillion insects on Earth
Makes sense. Insect lifespans are so short that evolution can be much faster. Primates have been around for 65 million years and only have 431 species, a life form with 1/20th the lifespan at best would have to speciate much faster than that.
More likely the small size, flight and the holometabolous lifestyle.
There is the theory that the number of species is related to the number of available niches. For mammals, a tree may offer 2-3 with the ground, the branches and maybe something like burrowing (this is just for illustration purposes).
Insects can live in the leaves, dead branches, inside the wood, in the mosses, on the ground, in the leaf litter layer, burrowing etc., etc. because they are so small. They can also easily transit between different places because most of them can fly.
Because the larvae of holometabolous insects can occupy a completely different niche than the adults, every combination of niches can more or less be considered a new niche.
All of this is reflected in the species richness of insects. The primary wingless groups of insects are not very diverse compared to winged insects. And within the winged insects, the holometabolous species make up the vast majority. Hymenoptera, flies and beetles make up the majority of insects and they are all winged and holometabolous. If you just look at the hemimetabolous ones, they aren’t much more diverse than other groups of arthropods.
If your nihilism doesn’t make you happy, you’re doing it wrong. The absence of meaning should be a liberating factor, not a limiting one. It’s actually dope as fuck that there’s no greater purpose to your life, you can never fail as a person when there’s no standard you feel you have to meet.
basically life is minecraft: there’s no goal, we have to give ourselves reasons to live, and we can make those reasons precisely whatever the fuck we want, and that’s what makes it so fucking brilliant.
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